Why Is Creation Of Quality Feeds So Important For Comparison Channels?

Great amount of internet shops currently provides to customers many shopping opportunities. This trend also retains an attention of eshop owners who are always trying to achieve new customers. Their main target is to introduce offered goods and services to new buyers and change them to loyal customers. Price comparison shopping channels are excellent tools to achieve this goal.

How it works?

The main role of all price comparison channels is to generate so called feeds. These files usually exist in a form of a XLS and are available on a selected URL address. They contain exported data about products from a selected eshop. Each price comparison platform (e.g. Heureka) regularly downloads these files and updates availability of an offered assortment and its price.

Aforementioned principle of feed generation may seem easy. However, quality feeds are far more than just ordinary XLS files. Thus, it is very important to ensure regular, quick and reliable generation of these files.

Almost all eshops built on the CMS BUXUS are prepared to use price comparison platforms and are functionally well-equipped for this purpose.

Fastness

For better imagination, e.g. Heureka updates the data every hour. For that reason, it is essential to have the data in a respective eshop always fresh. However, selected data may be generated also at a time. It takes approximately 1 minute in case of Heureka. This interval is designated for data preparation in xml feeds (caching). Completed feed is then passed to a price comparison website.

Following the aforementioned, feeds for Heureka shall be generated every hour and ideally in advance of a download.

This example confirms that the fastness of feeds generation is a very important for successful completion of the process. Small eshops usually do not have problems with the sole generation. However, it may be a big challenge for big eshop owners. Good news is that CMS BUXUS is able to asynchronously generate feeds also for big eshops.

Reliability

Within the process of feeds generation, various complicated situations may occur. Running operation may be interrupted and undone or may contain incorrect data. Ultimately, CMS BUXUS is fully prepared to get under control cited and any other obstacles. In ui42, we usually solve these situations by creation of so called back-up feeds. In case of an interruption, Heureka downloads a file with older data (from a previous hour).

The biggest advantage of this procedure is that a comparison channel never gets an empty file. If we send an empty file to Heureka, all product shall become unmatched. This creates a catastrophic scenario each seller tries to prevent.

We also use effective monitoring tools that are able to indicate any failure occurring during generation processes. The main benefit of this tool is the ability to solve a problem immediately. In the process, we also use so called logging capable to retrospectively find out and repair a failure. We are able to set a monitoring of data correctness. Thus, we prevent displaying of incorrect product prices in an effective way. The outlined situation may happen as a result of incorrectly inserted data or defective store system.

Heureka is the best known and most widely used Slovak price comparison channel. However, CMS BUXUS supports many other, not only Slovak comparison platforms, as the following:

Heureka.cz

Najnakup

Pricemania

Arukereso.hu

Ceneo.pl

Najportal.cz

Zvozi.cz

Shopalike and others.

Moreover, our redaction system supports other feed formats. Except for the above-mentioned, CMS BUXUS is able to generate CVS feeds or json files.

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In ui42, we have a rich experience with interfaces of eshops built on CMS BUXUS with various price comparison channels. Many eshop owners confirm that they create a prevalent part of their sales. Thus, it is vital to focus on this tool.